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Martin Steven Lewis (born 9 May 1972 in Withington, Manchester, United Kingdom) is journalist, television presenter, website entrepreneur and author in the United Kingdom, who specialises in ways to save money. He is often referred to in the media as a "consumer campaigner" or "consumer champion" and goes by the (trademarked) title of "Money Saving Expert".
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Born at Withington Hospital in Manchester before it became a community hospital in 1972, Lewis's family moved south west from Didsbury to Cheshire while still young. Martin grew up in Norley near Delamere Forest in Cheshire and attended the independent King's School in Chester. Martin went on to study government and law at the London School of Economics. After graduating he spent a year as elected general secretary of the LSE Students' Union. After this he worked for London financial public relations firm Brunswick and did stand-up comedy part time. In 1997, he left to do a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism from Cardiff University's Centre for Journalism Studies.
After graduating he went to work at the BBC Business Unit as a producer on BBC Radio Five Live business programmes and was then an editor of the BBC Radio 4's Today Programme business slot. This was followed by the satellite TV channel Simply Money presented by Angela Rippon, where he developed the Money Saving Expert role.
After Simply Money ended in 2001, Lewis started writing a Deal of the Week column in the Sunday Express, and doing MoneySavingExpert slots on Channel 5's Open House with Gloria Hunniford; and being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Money Box and as a business and personal finance reporter for BBC1 Breakfast News.
He had a peak time programme on Five called It Pays to Watch! as well as presenting money special editions for ITV1's Tonight, and is regular "Money Saving Expert" on several others (including a weekly slot on Daybreak and Lorraine). He also appears on ITV1's This Morning, Five's The Wright Stuff and often appears as a guest expert on many news and other programmes.
He has a regular phone-in on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show and BBC Radio 1's Jo Whiley. He had his own daytime television series on ITV1 during December 2005 called Make Me Rich and also often appeares on the BBC programme Watchdog.
He has a fortnightly column in the Sunday Post and a monthly regional syndicated column in the Manchester Evening News and the Express & Star amongst others. He has been a past columnist for the Sunday Times, News of the World, The Guardian and the Sunday Express. All his columns are on the theme of saving money.
He is the author of two bestselling books, The Money Diet and The Three Most Important Lessons You've Never Been Taught and edited another, Thrifty Ways for Modern Days, which was based on contributions to a forum on his website.
Lewis created, runs and 100% owns (both personally and through his company Moneysavingexpert.com) the website MoneySavingExpert.com.
As of April 2008 it was ranked the biggest consumer and personal finance site in the UK with over 7 million users each month and over 3 million receiving the Martin's Money Tips weekly e-mail.
The website was designed for Lewis for a cost of £100 in February 2003. There is a team of 23 full time members of staff at "MoneySaving Towers" in Shepherd's Bush, west London. The website carries no advertisements, but rather affiliate links to other websites and thereby receives commission for purchases made and/or clicks through.
In August 2008, the company via which Lewis owns the website changed from being a limited company Martin S Lewis Ltd to an unlimited company Moneysavingexpert.com. This form of company is relatively rare, and means Lewis has unlimited personal liability for the company; the advantage of this setup to him is that the company no longer needs to submit its accounts to Companies House and thus his earnings from the website are not in the public domain but private. The last published accounts that are available, for the year ended 31 October 2006, showed assets of £1.14m, a level at which abbreviated accounts (only including a balance sheet) need be filed.
The website's yearly profit isn't known, but the 2006 accounts show payments due (including company taxes and any other current debts) of £1.15 million.
Lewis set up a charitable foundation called MSE Charity Fund and donates some of the profits to it. £500,000 as of July 2011 has been donated by him . This money is in turn distributed: two thirds to the MSE Charity and the rest to five other charities nominated by site users.
In late 2005, campaigns against what were claimed to be unfair bank charges gained momentum and a few small websites started to highlight the issue. Lewis was at the forefront of the media campaign to reclaim what he states are unfair and unlawful fees charged by UK banks. He presented the first mainstream television programme on how to get your money back (ITV1's Tonight) and in November 2006 published a step-by-step guide, including template letters, which speedily achieved its millionth download in February 2007 and by August 2007 had over four million downloads as well as regularly appearing across the media to champion the issue.
His campaign suffered a major setback in November 2009 when the Supreme Court ruled that the charges imposed by banks formed part of their fees for current account services and could not be assessed for fairness under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations. Although in the following days he announced that in association with other consumer groups he had hired Ray Cox QC (a barrister with previous experience of banking cases) to look into new legal arguments for account holders wishing to reclaim charges, which might possibly use regulation 5 of the Unfair Terms act as suggested by the Supreme Court Judgement, This attempt suffered a further setback when, on 22 December 2009, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) issued a statement saying that it had decided against taking forward such an investigation because it "would have a very limited scope and low prospects of success". The updated template letters allowing individuals to attempt to recover bank charges individually was further delayed from the promised date of the third week of January 2010 eventually being published late on 2 February 2010 although that then concentrated mainly on reclaiming on financial hardship grounds only, with hopes for further information regarding claims on legal grounds made via courts to "go live in the next couple of weeks"; the guide was eventually published late on 24 February 2010.
Lewis initially admitted "our instinctive guess is even with the new argument there is only a 10-20% chance of most people now getting charges back". although in his later updated guide said in relation to claiming via the courts the "chances of success are impossible to work out" and also "if you’ve had charges and don’t fit the Ombudsman’s criteria, it’s at this point you may need to accept you won’t get your money back or at least wait to see others are successful.".
In January 2007, he presented a programme Tonight on Council Tax Cashback, a campaign to get everyone in the UK to check and potentially challenge their Council Tax band, that first started on his website and has led, according to his website, to "many" backdated windfall payments resulting from thousands of claims.
In summer 2008, Lewis appeared on several television & radio programmes exhorting consumers to "cap your energy bills now", based on the prediction that there would be a further round of price increases at the end of 2008. "Capping prices" involved consumers locking themselves into rates higher than prevailing un-capped rates. After that point British Gas announced an increase of 30% on its un-capped prices, though in January 2009 UK energy companies' un-capped prices were reduced by up to 10%.
Information published by Uswitch, a price comparison site whose business motivation is to encourage frequent switching between energy suppliers, after the price cuts, in February 2009, suggested that "Those who were savvy enough to sign up to a competitive fixed-price plan last summer, before some increases in wholesale energy were passed on, are sitting pretty as prices would need to drop by 16% on average before it would be worth moving" but failed to be clear about which specific capped deals it was basing this assertion on, and when it was sensible to have committed to a capped rate deal.
Other large scale campaigns, with ensuing television programmes, include reclaiming payment protection insurance (it is predicted that this may grow to the same scale as bank charge reclaiming), reclaiming mortgage exit fees and reclaiming credit card charges, all of which have resulted in over 100,000 template letter downloads, according to Lewis' website.
Lewis became a Governor of the London School of Economics in 2008.
Lewis married long-time partner, former 5 News weather presenter Lara Lewington, on 31 May 2009.
Other than money saving, Lewis declares his interests as playing Scrabble, golf and reading historic novels. Being born a few miles from Maine Road in 1972, he is a keen supporter of Manchester City.
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